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Friday, April 28, 2000
One year ago: Upgrade
Two years ago: Not Hiding
A year ago yesterday and the day after, I was discussing about a mysterious troll who was talking about me on the swing-seattle-chat mailing list. I do think what I said about social scenes and breaking into them was valuable stuff! In fact, I think I've pointed to it before from various discussion forums and mailing lists, since this is a perennial topic.
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I was sitting at my desk after lunch today, when Chip suggested that if I didn't have anything pressing, I should take off early! It was a beautiful afternoon, and I was rarin' to go, indeed. But I decided that I'd work an hour on my database-scrubbing task. I think that daily progress needs to be made, or it will never be finished! So I did that, then when an article that usually arives on Saturday came early, I processed it as well. So even though I'd emailed
Jack to let him know that I'd be driving up early, I didn't leave until two-thirty (still significantly early).
I stopped at an outlet mall in Burlington on the way. I looked around at most of the stores, but there was really nothing that appealed to me, except some fudge in the candy store. I've a feeling that this mall isn't doing so great, since there was a high percentage of empty stores.
Jack was home from work, waiting for me, when I arrived. We decided to eat dinner at a barbecue place in Fairhaven. This is a restaurant and club that he's been to before and liked (he was listening to a blues guitarist there last night), but I hadn't been there before. The food was good! I had shredded pork, and Jack had baby back ribs. Mashed potatoes, a green salad, and cornbread, yum! We got caught up on each other's week.
Jack had suggested that we catch the nine-o'clock movie at the Pickford, which is the art-house movie theater downtown. I'd said something in the past about seeing Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, and he'd noticed that it was playing this week. The pickings can be slim for movies in Bellingham, since one chain owns most (all?) of the multiplexes in town. If that chain doesn't reach an agreement with a particular distributor, a movie might not ever play here!
We had some time until the movie started, but we drove down and bought our tickets, then headed back to a park overlooking Bellingham Bay. This is a popular spot for sunset-watching, which is what we did. The water, distant islands, clouds and trees made beautiful pictures for us.
Jack suggested we had time for ice cream before the movie, and I didn't protest. We stopped at an independent ice cream place a few blocks from the theater, and split a cone. After a big dinner we didn't need this, but it was good!
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I was impressed with Ghost Dog! It's a Jim Jarmusch film, starring Forrest Whitaker. Whitaker is a contract killer for some small-time mafiosi, but he sees himself as a samurai in service to one of the thugs. Of course neither understands the other. I liked the quirky, low-key tone, which succeeded in abstracting some violent plot twists so that I wasn't bothered by them. Great cast all around, and some very funny dialog. The ending is dark, but it couldn't have worked out any other way.
Jack was so tired when we got home! His bedroom was too messed up to open up the trundle bed there, so we were going to sleep on the futon downstairs. But he was zonked already by the time I got undressed -- I didn't have the heart to make him move. So I went downstairs and set up the futon, read for a while, and slept.
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